The Veggie Dinner Chronicles

It all started during field camp, when my friendships were still new and unbounded by shared car ownership or backpacking trips, when I was semi-desperate to prove I had some value to the cool people I wanted to befriend. When we came back from our first and second field camp modules, I, as someone who loves to cook for others and had already built up a sizable pantry from my road trip, offered to cook for everyone, an offer that was happily accepted.

Thus it began, with a meal of poorly-cooked brown rice, kale salad with soybeans, tofu miso soup, pan-fried potato coins with sriracha mayo, and the first of many, many renditions of roasted carrots. 

My apartment kitchen was furnished sparsely, with pots in three sizes and an equal number of pans. With a faulty-and-confusing-at-best stove system and no oven to speak of, cooking for a group ranging from six to twelve once a week was always a challenge and always a delight. 

The veggie dinner plot thickened when I started working at the farm, where I started taking home bags of fresh veggies which always featured carrots, usually spinach, and a smattering of other veggies including beets, rhubarb, potatoes, lettuce, heads of cabbage, green onions, mixed greens, microgreens, kale, and one time, a large bag of green tomatoes. 

Veggie dinners ranged from the large and raucous to the intimate and nostalgic. Sometimes Lodie would bring her guitar, sometimes Lily and I would cry about it. There was almost always a theme. One time, on fancy veggie dinner night, after dinner we went outside to play Trout, a drinking game brought to us from Frank, and then sock wrestled in the muddy grass, leaving my room littered with borrowed, grass-stained jeans.One time my housemate brought us boxes of leftover sushi from his on-campus job, making for an excellent post-dinner snack. Usually after dinner we’d all sit and giggle for a while, and sometimes Lodie would play music then. Rarely–although if asked I’d tell you I do it every time–I’d read a poem before dinner. Often Lily would ply me with cocktails as I cooked for the last half-hour, as Dylan did dishes beside me and we created a safe corner amidst the growing chaos. Usually, Lodie was our master of ceremonies. Guest lists included a core crew, invited every week via a group chat named “mega gc”, with others floating in and out as the semester progressed. 

As the harvest season wound down, I increasingly relied on friends to grab stuff from the grocery store–a bag of carrots, a block of tofu, a tub of ice cream. People always brought what I needed, usually in a timely manner, and I increasingly stopped thinking of veggie dinner as a solo event. Sometimes people brought their friends, or cousins, or a bottle of wine, or a side dish. Dukes’ side dishes were particularly epic, including her excellent beet pasta and consistently incredible chickpeas. Sometimes Duke and Lily baked. We almost always drank milkshakes for dessert.

One night, following our Twalk victory of a six-pack of Wheet-Bix, I set about concocting a meal made with Weetbix in every dish. From egg/parm/spinach/Weetabix “meatballs” that made our vegetarian practically weep to the best crispy WeetBix-breaded tofu of the semester, it was a huge success. That night none of our extended veggie dinner attendees showed up, so it was just the fish, happily chomping on our winnings. 

My best dishes included some life-changing risotto, a bastardized italian wedding soup with chickpeas instead of meatballs, a make-your-own spring roll night, fried green tomatoes, hand-made gnocchi, and endless combinations of fried tofu/halloumi/chickpeas, depending on the night. 

I learned a lot about food over the course of the semester. I perfected my brown rice recipe, I learned about all of the ways you can use Wheet-Bix in savory dishes, I made buckets of carrot-top chimichurri and vats of veggie broth, I got very creative with my veggie scraps. In many ways this was the first time I had a kitchen to myself–not shared with 15 other vegan-housemates, not Tiger’s gross Halifax apartment kitchen, but the first place where for the most part I got to make the rules and set the tone. I still had to contend with flatmates, but it felt like I got to settle into a pantry and a kitchen of my own in a way I hadn’t before.

In between veggie dinners, I’d often end up cooking for one friend or another on one of the other nights of the week between backpacking trips, which usually involved some more scrap-usage and an Asian-inspired rice bowl type concoction, usually to Dylan’s chagrin. For our backpacking trips, I always did the shopping, alone in our local New World listening to podcasts and exploring cooking instructions, and I usually cooked, too, delighting in some wonderful new combinations and old classics. 

In a surprise to know one, the food of the semester was one of the most important throughlines. I really realized how much eating and cooking good food matters to me this year, all the way back to our impromptu dinner parties in Tanzania. It seems food, growing it, cooking it, sharing it with others, is going to be a theme of my adult life. I hope that music made by friends, good cheer around a dinner table, and locally-grown veggies are always part of that equation, and that these veggie dinners were the first of many food-based traditions with people I love.

Veggie dinner also instilled in me a wonderful sense of routine for the week. It encouraged me to go to the farm even when I was exhausted on a Monday to make sure I had enough veggies, it got me up in the morning on Tuesdays to make veggie broth from the last week’s leftovers, and it ensured that every Tuesday night I’d have something to look forward to in the midst of my so-so Monday-Wednesdays in Christchurch. 

Veggie dinner instilled in me how much I love to bring together a group of people, something I already knew. It instilled in me that you can always slap together a set of dishes that make people smile. It instilled me in me that nothing tastes better than fresh, local veggies eaten amongst friends.

Veggie dinners made for a perfect excuse to get a little tipsy and a lot silly, an excuse for me to make a mess and get help cleaning up, a day to ensure our weeks were always a little brighter, louder, and more delicious. Did they make me an enemy of the people in my apartment? Yeah, a little bit. Would I do it again? Absolutely. To the first of many sets of veggie dinners, and the people who inspired me to cook them good food. I miss it already.